Description:

Marguerite Foccart was a dilettante from a minor but wealthy provincial noble family, Embraced just three decades before the French Revolution. When she came out in society, she went of course to Paris, where her first glimpses of the Parisian poor moved her intensely. She embarked on a career of philanthropy and led a life of celebrity as a demimondaine and (controversially) a stage actress. The poor’s love for her was so great that even the Kindred took notice. Coming to Paris to see her, the proto-anarch Robin Leeland was quite taken by the woman’s vibrancy. She stayed with him for a few years as a paramour, at which time she met Jeremy MacNeil. The Scotsman struck a chord within her, and she fell in love. While she was blood bound to Leeland, the ancient regnant had never handled the bond roughly. They both knew that she would return to him, so he let her accompany MacNeil to the Americas, where the two hoped to promote movements for political freedom among the mortals. The two arrived on the eve of the revolution. Just a few weeks after they arrived, they were in Boston one evening when a black-Indian freeman named Crispus Attucks was brought to a nearby doctor. Attucks had been shot down by British troops while leading a mob of colonists outraged at the Stamp Act. The two had noticed Attucks earlier, noting his strongly self-reliant character and love of freedom. As his life ebbed away from a Brown Bess ball, Marguerite saw that the wound was carefully cleaned and the ball extracted despite the fact that the wounds were clearly mortal. Then she gave the young freeman the Embrace and brought him into the ranks of the undead. Marguerite stayed for another few months, but her enthusiasm for the New World had soured. She was desperate to return to Leeland, to tell him the news and to ready France for the revolution it so desperately needed. She left Attucks with MacNeil to mentor — the childe was emotionally involved in the revolution, and the Scot was in any case her senior. She made the passage to France on a blockade runner’s brig, and the ride from Marseilles to Paris in a single night on a ghouled stallion. Marguerite delighted at the revolution, the freedom and the spirit that brought Franklin and Paine to Paris to help forge the ideal new state. Then, radically, the Terror, the sans-culottes, the furies of the guillotine left her cold for revolution. She understood the diffidence that Leeland showed, the careful intellectualization. She retreated into Leeland’s arms and stayed there until the 1940s. In 1944, she heard of MacNeil’s rebellion, and her love for him resurfaced. She rushed to his side, again with Leeland’s blessing, and with her progeny helped him to defend the fragile Anarch Free State. Marguerite Foccart is blood bound to Jeremy MacNeil, and he to her.